1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a battery power supply device characteristic measuring apparatus and a measuring method and, more particularly, to a battery power supply device characteristic measuring apparatus for measuring-the voltage current output characteristics of a battery power supply device using a battery power supply such as a solar cell, and a measuring method.
2. Related Background Art
Due to recent strong concern about the global environment, power supply systems such as a sunlight power generation system, a wind-force power generation system, and the like are considered promising as clean energy sources. Upon constituting a sunlight power generation system, a solar cell array is constructed by recognizing the characteristics of solar cell modules and determining serial/parallel connections of solar cell modules so as to obtain a desired output and voltage.
In order to recognize the characteristics of each solar cell module, in a conventional method of measuring the voltage-current output characteristics of a solar cell, outdoor light or solar simulator light illuminates the entire light-receiving surface of a solar cell, and measurements based on an electron load method, a capacitor load method, a bias power supply method, or the like are performed. In these methods, the operation point of the solar cell illuminated by light is changed continuously or stepwise from the short-circuiting state to the open state or vice versa, and the operation point voltages and currents are sampled to measure the voltage current output characteristics.
However, the above-mentioned method has the following problems.
More specifically, in the measurement of the voltage-current output characteristics of a large-scale solar cell module, when solar simulator light is used as illumination light, a solar simulator that can uniformly illuminate the entire light-receiving surface of the large-scale solar cell module is required. However, such solar simulator is a very large-scale equipment, requires a very large setting place and power supply capacity, and is very expensive. Also, when the large-scale solar cell module has a special shape, e.g., an extremely elongated shape, an existing solar simulator cannot cope with such module.
On the other hand, when outdoor light is utilized as illumination light, it can uniformly illuminate the entire surface of the large-scale solar cell module. However, since the illumination intensity, spectrum, and the like of the outdoor light are strongly influenced by the weather, time, and season at the time of measurement, constant measurement conditions cannot always be obtained.